This thesis uncovers truths and lies in the works of Mark Twain. It examines the way in which Twain's lies of exaggeration bring about truth. In his early newspaper writings, Twain developed a technique of exaggeration ...

Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre share striking parallels in form and content: each is narrated by an introspective yet adventurous narrator who encounters various triggers for his development, including authorities, mysterious ...

Throughout his writing, Nathaniel Hawthorne is interested in the power of art to bring about positive ethical change. In his tales, he questions the ability of aesthetic taste (as it was understood by Scottish Common Sense ...

While Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928) is often considered a light, autobiographical fantasy, it in fact is the summation and execution of Woolf’s theories of fiction as expressed in her critical and non-fiction essays. ...

In poems spanning his career, William Butler Yeats wrestled with the problem of human labor, which he saw as a source of suffering and despair. Though some poems depict the satisfaction of ideal labor, many others portray ...

In the early English novel British emigrants to the Americas occupied an ambivalent position within the empire; changed by the transatlantic ocean voyage and daily life in the colonies, colonists were distanced spatially ...

In the following thesis, I will examine Virginia Woolf's often contentious views concerning the theory and execution of biography. By focusing on the epistemology adumbrated in her essays and fiction, I will argue that the ...

Sermons were the dominant form of literature during the seventeenth century; thus, their role in shaping many aspects of England’s literary, social, and political history warrants more thorough exploration. Too often, in ...

Though folklore is a knowledge-sharing, identity-forming practice that is utilized by a number of cultural groups, many scholars deride its emphasis on orality and storytelling. One reason may be that folklore practitioners ...

At its simplest, this dissertation proposes two, possibly counterintuitive but mutually dependent, claims: 1) that O’Connor’s fiction can be, even must be, considered “beautiful,” and 2) that O’Connor writes the way she ...

During Zora Neale Hurston’s life, she wrote many controversial statements on
race. Scholars continually suggest that Hurston was merely pandering to the white nation or tricking her audience. By using Hurston’s own ...

What are the origins of the literary ritual of tragedy; what is the purpose of tragic catharsis? Jungian theory provides partial answers; the struggle of all protagonists is, at a profound level, the battle of egocentric ...

In the tumultuous years following the Easter Rising of 1916, the Irish author W.B. Yeats consistently turned to drama as a primary medium through which he could reflect on the state of contemporary Irish culture. This ...

This project investigates the neo-sacramentalism of various Midwestern modernists, particularly that of Sherwood Anderson. Modernists from the Midwest tended to draw from Midwestern nature a sacramental vision of the world ...

Mark Twain’s Christian Science, his last major published work, is rarely read or examined within Twain scholarship. The book is generally considered to be weak, hastily written, and overly passionate, which has left it ...

My dissertation considers how twentieth-century writers such as F. Scott
and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Sylvia Plath, and
Bret Easton Ellis have attempted to find meaning in a world that no ...

This thesis examines three of Rebecca Harding Davis’s writings published by the
Atlantic Monthly from 1860 to 1862. Davis begins with questioning capitalist claims of
building a middle class in “Life in the Iron Mills.” ...